Seeker Blog

This Peter Huber article is a bit dated [from April 10, 2007] but the content is just as worthy of consideration today:

Bad policies deliver their disasters when overtaken by events. A peace-in-our-time narcotic stupefied democracies for years while Hitler seized power and built Panzers. We are now four decades into another self-induced daze that will end in another great spasm of death.

When Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine in 1955, humanity’s century-long war against germs seemed all but over. Public sanitation had driven them out of the water supply. Vaccines and antibiotics had then chased them out of the lungs, fluids and intestines of the public itself. “The time has come to close the book on infectious disease,” our surgeon general would announce in 1967. “We have basically wiped out infection in the United States.”

Viewed in that context, the FDA amendments that President Kennedy signed into law in 1962, to regulate drugs in the peaceful, germ-free future, seemed to make good scientific sense. Cholera had indeed given way to cigarettes and cholesterol. The diseases of the future would be choreographed by lifestyle and genes, not germs. The drugs of the future would target cancer, arthritis and other problems rooted in human chemistry. The new killers would creep up rather predictably and evenly, on adults, not children. Widely prescribed, pill-a-day treatments might easily cause more harm than good. Just months earlier, a horrified world had discovered that one drug of the future — thalidomide — relieved morning sickness and helped people fall asleep; but it also halted the growth of a baby’s limbs in the womb.

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